Sylvain Brouard

The French Referendum: The Not So Simple Act of Saying Nay

For the second time in the history of the French Vth Republic, the first having led to the resignation of Charles De Gaulle in 1969, a president lost a national referendum. On May 29, 2005, 54.7% of French voters rejected the European Constitutional Treaty, even though France was one of the major proponents of the European Convention which led to the Constitutions drafting. The victory of the “no” vote had been foreseen, but neither the margin of victory, nor the high turnout (almost 70.5%) were expected. The rejection of the Constitution raised two concerns: the first related to the position of France in Europe, the second to its domestic impact. Why did the French electorate vote as it did? Did voters make up their minds based on national cues, the European issue being generally of little importance even in European elections ( Franklin, Marsh, and McLaren 1994 ; Van der Eijk and Franklin 1996 )? Is the referendum result the consequence of a growing anti-European attitude, which could cause considerable damage to the process of EU integration? Will a new cleavage grounded on attitudes to Europe and capable of altering the traditional left-right organization emerge in the French political system? Our warmest thanks to our colleagues, Chantal Barry, Arianne Chebel dAppolonia, and Manlio Cinnalli for their remarks on and their help with this piece.

The Europeanization of Domestic Legislatures : The Empirical Implications of the Delors' Myth in Nine Countries

Description : In ten years 80 per cent of the legislation related to economics, maybe also to taxes and social affairs, will be of Community origin. This declaration has been largely quoted, paraphrased and deformed by different authors, creating a persistent myth according to which 80 per cent of the legislative activity of the national legislatures would soon be reduced to the simple transposition of European norms. This book addresses the topic of the scope and impact of Europeanization on national legislation, as a part of the Europeanization debate which raises normative concerns linked to the democratic deficit debate. This state-of-the-art book shows that there are many assumptions and claims on how European integration may affect national legislation and, more generally, domestic governance but that there is a lack of solid and comparative data to test them. The aim of the book is to give a solid and comparative insight into Europeanization focusing on effective outcomes in a systematic way.This book analyzes the period 1986-2008 and includes an introduction, a global overview of European legislative activities which set the background for Europeanization of national legislatures, 9 country contributions (8 EU member states + Switzerland) including systematic, comparative and standardized data, tables and figures, and a conclusion with a comparative analysis of the European and domestic reasons for Europeanization. All national contributions conclude that Europeanization of national legislation is much more limited than assumed in the literature and public debate. It is limited to 10 to 30 per cent of laws (depending on the country), far less than the 80 per cent predicted by Jacques Delors and mentioned daily by medias and public opinion leaders to demonstrate EU domination on member states.Beside that general statement, the various chapters propose a deep insight on EU constraint over national legislation, providing much information on the kind of laws and policies that are Europeanized, the evolution of this process through time, the impact of Europeanization on the balance of powers and the relations between majority and opposition at national level, the strategies developed by national institutions in that context, and many other issues, making the book of interest to academics and policy-makers concerned with Europeanization and national legislation.

The Politics of Constitutional Veto in France: Constitutional Council, Legislative Majority and Electoral Competition

This article examines the development of constitutional politics under the Fifth Republic. In particular, it investigates the logics underlying constitutional vetoes. It shows that data for the French case do not support existing theories of veto politics. Therefore, the article develops an electoral theory of veto politics. It emphasises the fact that the incentives generated by electoral competition shape the signalling game between legislative majority, legislative minority and the Constitutional Council. The structure of this game fuels a high level of vetoes and explains the pattern of vetoing in France.

Do the media set the parliamentary agenda? A comparative study in seven countries

A growing body of work has examined the relationship between media and politics from an agenda-setting perspective: Is attention for issues initiated by political elites with the media following suit, or is the reverse relation stronger? A long series of single-country studies has suggested a number of general agenda-setting patterns but these have never been confirmed in a comparative approach. In a comparative, longitudinal design including comparable media and politics evidence for seven European countries (Belgium, Denmark, France, Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom), this study highlights a number of generic patterns. Additionally, it shows how the political system matters. Overall, the media are a stronger inspirer of political action in countries with single-party governments compared to those with multiple-party governments for opposition parties. But, government parties are more reactive to media under multiparty governments.

Why do French MPs Focus More on Constituency Work than on Parliamentary Work

The relationship between French members of the National Assembly and citizens is paradoxical. On the one hand, the French political culture, constitution and history favour a very abstract conception of representation: MPs are supposed to act as trustees and collectively to embody the French Nation. On the other hand, they are deeply involved in their constituencies and express a great level of satisfaction being there. In order to understand how French MPs reconcile the national and local dimensions of their mandate, the data gathered through face-to-face interviews with MPs are described. Then a scale analysis is provided in order to sum up the local–national orientations of the MPs. Using this scale, it is possible to test the impact of several variables on the territorial focus of MPs: electoral incentives, political ambition, ideological factors and working conditions at the local and the national level.

Policy beyond politics? Public opinion, party politics and the French pro-nuclear energy policy

At first sight, French nuclear energy policy offers a textbook example of how technical, constitutional and economic restrictions, powerful interest groups, and path dependence, constrain democratic responsiveness. This paper uses what might seem to be an unlikely case in order to question explanations of policy choices in terms of technocracy, path dependence, and interest groups, against the background of an underestimated factor: party and coalition strategies. The original data collected on public attitudes towards nuclear energy, and the attention dedicated to this issue in the media, as well as in the parliamentary and electoral arenas, show that the effect of public opinion is conditioned by party incentives to politicize the issue at stake. In other words, parties and coalition-making constraints act as a mediating variable between citizens preferences and policy choices. These findings point to the need to integrate this conditional variable into analyses of responsiveness and models of policymaking.

Who Cares About the EU? French MPs and the Europeanisation of Parliamentary Questions

This study is based on the idea that the effective involvement of national parliamentarians in European Union (EU) affairs is as important for the capacity of national parliaments to adapt to the consequences of European integration as the elaboration of new institutional mechanisms. It therefore investigates the attention given to Europe in parliamentary questions as an indicator of the Europeanisation of the French National Assembly. Have French MPs developed a greater degree of attention to Europe in their ordinary work? What are the factors behind individual variations in MPs attention to Europe? The empirical analysis of more than 334,000 questions from 1988 to 2007 shows the limited Europeanisation of French MPs work, revealing that the type of questions (oral, written, to the government) is the most significant factor explaining the level of attention given to Europe.

Constitutional courts as veto players: lessons from the United States, France and Germany

The number of constitutional courts and supreme courts with constitutional review rights has strongly increased with the third wave of democratisation across the world as an important element of the new constitutionalism. These courts play an important role in day-to-day politics as they can nullify acts of parliament and thus prevent or reverse a change in the status quo. In macro-concepts of comparative politics, their role is unclear. Either they are integrated as counter-majoritarian institutional features of a political system or they are entirely ignored: some authors do not discuss their potential impact at all, while others dismiss them because they believe their preferences as veto players are entirely absorbed by other actors in the political system. However, we know little about the conditions and variables that determine them as being counter-majoritarian or veto players. This article employs the concept of Tsebelis’ veto player theory to analyse the question. It focuses on the spatial configuration of veto players in the legislative process and then adds the court as an additional player to find out if it is absorbed in the pareto-efficient set of the existing players or not. A court which is absorbed by other veto players should not in theory veto new legislation. It is argued in this article that courts are conditional veto players. Their veto is dependent on three variables: the ideological composition of the court; the pattern of government control; and the legislative procedures. To empirically support the analysis, data from the United States, France and Germany from 1974 to 2009 is used. This case selection increases variance with regard to system types and court types. The main finding is that courts are not always absorbed as veto players: during the period of analysis, absorption varies between 11 and 71 per cent in the three systems. Furthermore, the pattern of absorption is specific in each country due to government control, court majority and legislative procedure. Therefore, it can be concluded that they are conditional veto players. The findings have at least two implications. First, constitutional courts and supreme courts with judicial review rights should be systematically included in veto player analysis of political systems and not left aside. Any concept ignoring such courts may lead to invalid results, and any concept that counts such courts merely as an institutional feature may lead to distorted results that over- or under-estimate their impact. Second, the findings also have implications for the study of judicial politics. The main bulk of literature in this area is concerned with auto-limitation, the so-called ‘self-restraint’ of the government to avoid defeat at the court. This auto-limitation, however, should only occur if a court is not absorbed. However, vetoes observed when the court is absorbed might be explained by strategic behaviour among judges engaging in selective defection.

MPs' Issue Attention in Parliament: Evidence of a Stick-Slip Process of Attention Allocation in the French National Assembly

Until now, political science has focused mainly on institutions or political actors and much less on the content of politics, the issues political actors and institutions deal with. Based on the seminal work of Jones and Baumgartner ((2005), The politics of attention: How government prioritises problems. Chicago: University of Chicago Press), the article will study MPs issue attention in Parliament and will investigate the source of punctuation in attention allocation. Even if a growing literature is dedicated to this issue, the two main sources of friction – cognition and institution – have not yet been directly tested. Based on an exhaustive database of the parliamentary questions in the French National Assembly between 1988 and 2007, the paper will focus on the dynamics of issue attention in the parliamentary questions at three levels to show that: the general punctuation hypothesis is valid for the parliamentary question agendas; the comparison between the levels of punctuation of the institutionally unconstrained written question agenda and the institutionally constrained question to government agenda is consistent with the idea that higher institutional friction induces higher punctuation in attention allocation; and the dynamics of issue attention in the parliamentary question agendas at the individual level exhibit strong patterns of cognitive friction.

How terrorism affects political attitudes: France in the aftermath of the 2015–2016 attacks

Abstract This study investigates what impact the terrorist attacks in Paris (2015) and Nice (2016) had on political attitudes in France. Drawing on nine cross-sectional surveys, it tests the premises of three major theories of opinion change that predict contrasting shifts in opinion among ordinary citizens according to their ideological position in the aftermath of terrorist attacks: the Reactive Liberals Hypothesis (RLH), the Terror Management Theory (TMT), and the Bayesian Updating Theory (BUT). In line with both RLH and BUT, the findings show that left-wing sympathisers shifted toward the right following the attacks. However, the results suggest that, in line with BUT, the attacks only had a significant impact on attitudes toward security, while they had no effect on attitudes toward immigration, or toward moral and socio-economic issues.